SINCLAIR SINECURE. 



271 



performing. Notwithstanding all these multiplied 

 and mortifying difficulties, Sir John was determined 

 not to be baffled in the accomplishment of the Her- 

 culean task which he had set himself. He engaged 

 five statistical missionaries, to whom he appropri- 

 ated different divisions of the country ; and, by their 

 means, the accounts of no less than twenty-five 

 parishes, which must otherwise have been totally 

 awanting, were ably and accurately drawn up. On 

 the 1st of January, 1798, seven years and a half 

 after its commencement, the work was brought to 

 its completion. It was comprised in twenty thick 

 octavo volumes; and to these another was subse- 

 quently annexed. A New Statistical Account of 

 Scotland is at present (1838) in the course of pub- 

 lication. 



In May, 1793, Sir John printed and circu- 

 lated a plan for establishing a Board of Agricul- 

 tural and Internal Improvement; in which he 

 pointed out the nature of its plan, and the beneficial 

 results which might be expected from it. On the 

 15th of the same month he moved, in his place in 

 Parliament, an address to the Crown, in favour of 

 the proposed establishment. An animated and in- 

 teresting debate took place on the occasion, which 

 was adjourned till the 17th, when, on a division, it 

 was carried by a majority of 75; 101 voting in its 

 favour, and only 26 being opposed to it. The 

 Board, soon after, was not only appointed, but re- 

 ceived a charter from the crown, in which Sir John 

 was nominated its first president 



Having accomplished the establishment of the 

 Board of Agriculture, Sir John's next favourite 

 project was to secure the passing of " A General 

 Bill of Enclosure ;" but he found the subject hedged 

 /n by obstacles on all sides, which could not be fot 

 over. At a subsequent period, however, under the 

 administration of Lord Sidmouth, Sir John suc- 

 ceeded in carrying through a bill of great importance 

 to the object in view. 



So early as 1783, Sir John had acquired con- 

 siderable reputation as a writer on finance, by a 

 pamphlet which he then published, in opposition to 

 the gloomy views promulgated by others. This 

 subject he afterwards followed out in his " Review 

 of the Financial Administration of the Right Hon- 

 ourable William Pitt;" to which an Appendix was 

 added in 1789, and a third part in 1790. In 1803, 

 the whole of Sir John's lucubrations on these and 

 collateral subjects were collected into an elaborate 

 work, in three octavo volumes, under the title of 

 a " History of the Public Revenue of the British 

 Empire, containing an account of the Public Income 

 and Expenditure, from the remotest periods record- 

 ed in history to Michaelmas, 1802." 



About the year 1797, Sir John began to suffer 

 from the effects of his over-exertion, which, al- 

 though they did not show themselves in any specific 

 form, yet had induced a weak and enervated state 

 of the body; and to his enthusiastic temperament, 

 it was a misery to find that he was almost unequal 

 lo the task of managing his private affairs pursu- 

 ing useful inquiries or following out those political 

 investigations, which the contemporary aspect of 

 civil society seemed to demand. From the decay 

 of his own health, he was led to the consideration 

 of the subject in, general, and was much struck in 

 pursuing his statistical observations, by the fact, 

 that so few of the numbers of mankind born attain 

 any extent of years, even in the healthiest climates, 

 and that even when life is prolonged, it is to so 

 many little less than a burden, from the embitter- ' 



ments of disease. This led him into a course of 

 reading on the subject, and the result was a pam- 

 phlet in 4to, published in 1803, entitled " Hints on 

 Longevity." In the same year, Sir John collected 

 his Essays on Miscellaneous Subjects, and published 

 them together in an 8vo volume. 



From the attention excited, both at home and 

 abroad, by his pamphlet on Longevity, as well as 

 from his bias towards codification, Sir John now 

 began seriously to turn his mind to an exten- 

 sive work on the general subject of health, in which 

 he proposed to condense into a manageable form, all 

 the widely scattered materials to be found in ancient 

 and modern authors. This was published as a Code 

 of Health and Longevity in four vols. 8vo., but 

 afterwards abridged to one vol. It was followed 

 in 1819 by his Code of Agriculture, a work which 

 has gone through several editions and' translations, 

 and which is very generally esteemed. 



In 1810, Sir John Sinclair was made a privy 

 councillor; and in 1811, under the administration 

 of Mr Percival, he was appointed cashier of excise 

 for Scotland, a situation which he for a time con- 

 tinued to hold. 



Early in 1815, he was induced to take an excur- 

 sion to the Netherlands, principally with the pur- 

 pose of examining into the agricultural state of that 

 country, and of ascertaining the relative prices of 

 grain in Great Britain and the continental corn 

 countries, more especially Flanders and France, the 

 causes of such difference, and the most effectual 

 means of preventing for the future any material 

 variations. After his return, he threw his obser- 

 vations together in a printed form, in a pamphlet 

 entitled, " Hints on the Agricultural State of the 

 Netherlands compared with that of Great Britain." 



Besides the works which we have specified, Sir 

 John published a great variety of smaller pamphlets 

 and tracts, all bearing on points of agriculture or 

 political economy. He died in George street, 

 Edinburgh, where he had resided for the last twenty 

 years of his life, on the 21st December, 1835. See 

 his Memoirs in the Quarterly Journal of Agricul- 

 ture, and also those published by his son. 



SINDH. See Indus. 



SINDON. See Byssus. 



SINE, in mathematics; a line drawn perpendi- 

 cularly from one end of an arc upon the radius, 

 drawn to the other end. The sine of the arc is 

 also the sine of the angle subtended by the arc. 

 Trigonometry teaches that, in plain triangles, the 

 sides are to each other as the sines of the opposite 

 angles; in spherical triangles, however, the sines of 

 the sides are to each other as the sines of the angles 

 opposite to these sides. Hence it appears how im- 

 portant the sine is for finding certain parts of tri- 

 angles, from certain given parts. To render these 

 calculations (which occur so often) more easy, tables 

 have been drawn up, in which the logarithms of the 

 sines are given By cosine is understood the sine 

 of the complement of the arc (such an arc as, if 

 added, would make it ninety degrees) Versed sine 

 is that portion of the radius which is intercepted 

 between the sine and the arc. (For the other im- 

 portant lines in trigonometry, as the secant, tangent, 

 &c., see the respective articles.) Among the many 

 tables, we mention only those of Vega, and the 

 Tables Portatives, par Francois Collet, published by 

 Didot. See Logarithm. 



SINECURE (Latin, sine euro, without a cure); 

 properly, an ecclesiastical term signifying a benefice 

 without cure of souls. ''See Abbes Commenda- 



